StupidiNews!

• Convicted terrorist "Carlos The Jackal" is back on trial this week in a French court for a series of bombings near Paris in the 1980s.
• A four-hour general strike in Israel was called Monday as talks between trade unions and the finance ministry broke down over the weekend.
• Several thousand protesters surrounded the White House Sunday in an effort to convince President Obama to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline from being built from Canada to Texas.
• In the wake of Greece's government collapse, Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is finding himself in much the same situation, facing calls for resignation before a tough austerity budget vote.
• Wednesday represents the first test of the country's new Emergency Alert System as every radio, TV, and satellite channel in the country will participate at 2 PM EST.

Last Call

If you actually thought o'l Boss Hogg down in Mississippi was really going to vote against the state's odious and rabidly unconstitutional "personhood" amendment on Tuesday's ballot in the state, then you haven't been paying attention to the GOP for the last decade.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offered his support Friday for an amendment to the state constitution that would define life as beginning at the moment of conception, saying he cast his absentee ballot for the measure despite struggling with its implications.


"I have some concerns about it," he said in a statement issued Friday, a day after casting his ballot. "But I think all in all, I believe life begins at conception, so I think the right thing to do was to vote for it."

On Wednesday, Barbour, a Republican, said that he was still undecided and that the measure was "too ambiguous."

Initiative 26 would define personhood as "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."

Though the text of the amendment is simple, the implications if it passes couldn't be more complex. If approved by Mississippi voters on Tuesday, it would make it impossible to get an abortion and hamper the ability to get some forms of birth control.

Of course he grudgingly supports ignoring Roe v. Wade and decades of judicial precedent, not to mention removing the right for women to determine their own bodies.  The only problem he has with the measure is that it's not law already.  Part of the problem is that Initiative 26 takes the oxygen out of the room for discussing Initiative 27, which would immediately disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in the state.

Mississippi lawmakers argued about voter ID for more than 15 years before Republican Sen. Joey Fillingane of Sumrall started the petition drive that put Initiative 27 on the ballot. Supporters say requiring ID would protect the integrity of elections. Opponents say there's been little proof that people are trying to vote under others' names, and that requiring ID be a way to intimidate older black voters who were once subject to Jim Crow laws.

The National Conference of State Legislatures says 30 states require all voters to show ID at the polls, many of them in the Deep South. Fourteen of the 30 require photo ID.

Nsombi Lambright, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, said that in poor, rural areas, many people might lack any form of government-issued photo ID. She also worries a voter ID law would be applied unevenly, and perhaps unfairly, by poll workers who might not be well trained.

"Voter ID is one of those unnecessary barriers to the voting booth," Lambright said. "We believe it's going to represent a strong deterrent for communities of color, for the elderly and for poor folks to go to the ballot box."

Don't get me wrong, Initiative 26 is awful.  But it's a smokescreen to get Initiative 27 passed with a minimum of fanfare, and yet another red state will be able to throw up economic and social barriers to voting.  That's just as big an issue in the Magnolia State and across the US.

They Said He Had To Go To Rehab, I Said No, No, No

The reconstructive surgery on the Bush 43 presidency continues as McClatchy's Jim Rosen would like you to know that Dubya is the "forgotten man" behind the Arab Spring (according to Huckleberry Hound and the AEI, at least.)

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a military lawyer who's served active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, thinks that's a premature judgment pending the outcome of fast-moving events that may take a decade or longer to play out in the Middle East.

"President Bush deserves credit for creating a spirit that even in the Middle East, where grudges are held forever, things can change and Islamic governments can accommodate the rule of law, tolerance, democracy and other concepts we take for granted," Graham said.

Daniele Pletka, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, said the replacement of repressive regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan with democratic governments, however fragile, is a historic triumph for Bush.

"Of course he should be getting credit because he socialized the world to the notion that somehow democracy was possible in the Arab world," she said. "This was an almost ridiculous notion before his presidency. And we shouldn't discount the liberation of 50 million Muslims who'd lived under oppressive Afghan and Iraqi rule."

Granted, Rosen does put a number of very valid reasons as to why Bush continues to be ignored in the article.  But at best, it's "Earth is flat, views differ" journalism at its finest.  The real tell is while the notion in the article involves whether or not Dubya should get credit, President Obama isn't mentioned at all in the piece.

Kind of telling if you ask me.

It's Not That They're Crooks, It's The Fact All This Is Legal

Some 30 major US corporations have not paid taxes in 3 years.  They made $160 billion collectively.  You paid more taxes than they did.  All of that is 100% legal.  And they gained $10 billion collectively in tax credits.  Not only did they make plenty of money, as a US taxpayer, you gave them more money.

One of the driving forces behind the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests is the fact that corporations have not been paying their fair share in taxes. A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice will no nothing to alleviate the protesters’ frustration.

CTJ looked at 280 companies, all of them members of the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.” And those who paid even half the statutory corporate tax rate paid far more than many of their competitors.

Here's the list:





Boeing, GE, Wells Fargo, even Mattel. Not a dime in taxes. But we gave $10 billion to these "job creators" over the last three years.  Republicans want to make this arrangement permanent.  GE alone got nearly $5 billion in tax credit over three years and made $10 billion on top of that.  Well Fargo got over half a billion in tax credit on top of the near $50 billion they made in the last three years.

But we don't dare tax the "job creators".  If we did why we might have an unemployment rate of 9 percent or something.

Follow Up: Restaurant That Banned Kids Sees Growth

We posted about a restaurant that banned kids under six.  Some parents were outraged, some people said it was great for a business to exercise choice.  As always, the logical response was more moderate.  It does make sense that kids not be allowed in every single eatery in the world, and those who prefer a kid-free environment should have somewhere to go.  That restaurant has made a successful go of it, increasing revenue by 20% since the rule went into effect.

MONROEVILLE, Pa. -- In July, McDain's Restaurant started a ban on children younger than 6. The story quickly spread from Monroeville and went viral on the Internet, being featured on CNN and Yahoo!

Four months later, owner Mike Vuick told Channel 4 Action News that he has seen a 20 percent increase in business at his eatery on Broadway Boulevard.

"People came from as far away as Detroit, Columbus, D.C., identifying themselves as people to congratulate me on the move," Vuick said.

Released By Mistake, Inmate Turns Himself In

Luis Lopez fled a crime scene where he hit two cars while intoxicated.  Because he fled, his sentence was more serious and he went to jail for a year.  He went through the legal process and was serving his punishment so he could get on to the next chapter in his life.  And then he was released unexpectedly.

OCALA, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) - Luis Lopez has spent the last three months at the Marion County Jail. He was arrested last August for his second DUI, driving with a suspended license, hitting two cars then leaving the scene.

He pleaded guilty on all counts and was just sentenced this week to a year in jail, followed by a year probation; but then, the most bizarre thing happened.

"I was released from jail," said Lopez. "For some reason, I just listened to what they had to say."

At first, Lopez, 37, questioned the guards, but after they assured him they had the paperwork from the courts ordering his release, he followed their orders and walked out of jail.

Citing his desire to stay on the right side of the law, he consulted with his lawyer just to make sure, and got the devastating news: it was a mistake.  He had to go back.  Lopez immediately turned himself in and will complete his sentence.  He showed great composure and proactively did the right things to make sure this didn't backfire and create an even worse situation.  I feel for the guy, just because it has to be hard to have that moment of joy taken away so quickly.  I admire him for doing the right thing despite the obvious temptation to just go and stay off the radar.

Running The Numbers Wrong, Part 2

On Thursday I pointed out the weird subjective holes in Nate Silver's usually solid objective logic where he declared President Obama's re-election chances to be 50-50 at best, and basically doomed even against Rick Perry unless the economy picks back up.

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one who noted that particular incongruity in Silver's work as Jon Chait picked up on that later on Thursday in NY Mag as he points out Bush 43 was in the same approval ratings boat in 2004 and still won (barely and because of seriously messy voting problems in Ohio, but that's another story) after attacking John Kerry.

If that’s correct then Obama has a chance to have his approval rating rise simply by drawing a sharp contrast against the Republican nominee. In other words, incumbent approval rating isn't something that's independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison.

I don’t want to overstate this. It may be wrong. (Or, as a great man once put it, "I don't have the facts to back this up.") But I think that we have to be a little cautious about interpreting the importance of Obama’s mediocre approval ratings in the face of a polarized electorate and a still-discredited opposition party.

In turn, Steve Benen took Silver to task as well as he finds Chait's number were indeed correct.

And why did Bush’s support grow from the mid-40s to the low-50s? Chait argued, persuasively, that voters starting seeing the president “within the context of a partisan choice,” and decided they liked him more after taking a look at the wealthy Massachusetts challenger with an awkward personality and who was often accused of flip-flopping.

Ahem.

Republican-leaning voters who weren’t sold on Bush — weak economy, awful job growth, etc. — became more inclined to support him after evaluating the alternative. Could that happen again with Democratic-leaning voters and Obama? Of course it can. As Chait put it, the president “has a chance to have his approval rating rise simply by drawing a sharp contrast against the Republican nominee. In other words, incumbent approval rating isn’t something that’s independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison.”

If Republicans were a popular party with a popular agenda, this would be a very different story. Likewise, if Obama were a poor campaigner facing a charismatic GOP frontrunner, I’d have a different set of expectations. But I’ve seen a lot of Obama political obituaries, and at this point, none of them have proven persuasive to me.

Michael Stickings over at The Reaction also disputes Silver's supposition.

Simply put, "Obama: Yes or No" is much different than "Obama or Romney/Perry." In the latter case, that is, in the election, the president will have an enormous advantage given the unpopularity of the Republican Party and its extremism and the lack of strong appeal of the Republican candidate to any constituency outside a certain part of the GOP -- for Perry, the right-wing base; for Romney, the somewhat more moderate but still deeply conservative establishment.

As well, Obama is an outstanding campaigner. He will draw sharp distinctions between himself and his Republican challenger, shaping the election's dominant narratives, and will likely energize voters much as he did in '08 -- perhaps not to that degree, but I suspect more than his detractors expect. He's got appeal that no one on the Republican side can even approach.

 

And that's the basic issue there.  An incumbent's approval ratings aren't equivalent to re-election polling of the incumbent against specific candidates.  Nate did everything to draw the correlation between the two but in order to bridge the gap, he filled the blanks in with some really silly Village "conventional wisdom" that liberals are disillusioned with the President enough that they will turn the White House over to the Republicans.

There are plenty of people who aren't happy with all of President Obama's policies.  I'm one of them, specifically he's dropped the ball on some economic and a lot of civil liberties issues in order to triage the country for the first two years, and I accept that.  I'm still going to vote for him over any of the specific Republicans in the race right now based on policy.  I suspect a whole hell of a lot of other people are out there in my situation as well.

More importantly, as more people begin to see the list of the President's accomplishments despite the GOP saying "Hell no you can't" to everything, they are starting to come around.  Hell, watch five minutes of any of the GOP debates and you'd want to vote for Obama too.

Greek Fire, Part 44

And Greek PM George Papandraeou is out as a new Greek transitional government will be formed.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou will resign after the makeup of the nation's new coalition government is decided, officials said Sunday.

Sunday's Cabinet meeting will be the last with Papandreou as prime minister, a government spokesman said in a statement. The meeting will focus on issues relating to Monday's Euro group meeting, at which Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos will represent Greece, the statement said.

A spokesman for Papandreou's Socialist PASOK party said the prime minister will resign after the government is announced.

Venizelos is likely to remain in his post as finance minister in a new government, sources told Greek television. Candidates for the prime minister's job include Petros Moliviatis and Loukas Papaimos, according to Greek television.

The new government will have a life of four months, according to Greek television, citing sources, and elections will be held in early spring.

Papandreou won the no confidence vote on Saturday, but he's stepping down because opposition leader Antonis Samaras insisted that he did in exchange for winning the no confidence vote (which is kind of odd, because if Papandreou lost, the same process would have happened.)  I guess it was done in order to take the markets by surprise, maybe?

Either way things just got even more strange in Europe.  Batten down the hatches.  Monday's going to be crazy.

Last Call

Rachel Maddow surmises that Herman Cain's campaign is nothing more than just performance art.

Ticking off a list of Cain’s numerous gaffes, unintentionally (or not!) bizarre statements and pop culture-derived policy ideas, Maddow said she’s convinced Cain isn’t seriously running for President.

“It is one thing to be a gaffe-prone, inexperienced candidate. But the gaffes are too perfect,” Maddow said.

“Black walnut, noted for it’s ‘staying power,’ doesn’t exist anymore. The book chapter on the magic number. The 9-9-9 thing from the video game. The great poet Pokemon. Pokemon? Really? A Pokemon movie? Really?” she said. “A string of supposed gaffes like that is not found in nature. But at this point in the campaign no one has figured out that this is not politics. This is art.”

“Is this guy pulling our leg? The answer is ‘yes,’ this guy is pulling our leg.”

It's a valid theory, but Herman Cain needs to be taken deadly seriously, as do all the GOP candidates. Worse case scenario is that one of them may become President. At the very least, Cain has already made his influence on the rest of the crowd with his flat tax nonsense mucking up the actual debate we need to be having about fixing the economy.

If the Democrats decide there's political benefit to going down this road, Cain's performance art will have very real and very painful consequences for millions of Americans.  Dismissing Cain as a joke is all well and good, but let's remember to do so on the merits (or lack of them) rather than just pointing and laughing and saying "Boy these people are idiots, there's nothing for us to worry about."

Or are we forgetting 2010, Rachel?

Penn State Of Denial

As much as the arguments about looking the other way while NCAA athletics programs pay athletes under the table (meaning at least these kids get a small slice of the pie that these major programs rake in for universities) are valid ones, the culture of lawlessness that these programs create has very real consequences.

Documents indicating that criminal charges are being filed against former Penn State football coach and Second Mile founder Jerry Sandusky were posted to the Pennsylvania court system website Friday afternoon.


The documents listed 40 charges of sex offenses involving minors as being filed against Sandusky, 67, on Friday. The documents show the case is assigned to District Judge Leslie Dutchcot in Ferguson Township, but employees at her office said no charging documents had been received by the time it closed at 5 p.m.

Sandusky has been the subject of a state grand jury investigation for the past two years. The (Harrisburg) Patriot-News in March broke the story of the investigation, reporting that it began in 2009, when a 15-year-old told authorities that Sandusky had inappropriate contact with him over a four-year period, starting when he was 10.

Calls to the state Attorney General’s Office Friday were not returned. Sandusky’s attorney, Joseph Amendola, also could not be reached.

The charges against Sandusky include one made during his final four years at Penn State under Joe Paterno, as well as the following eight years after he left the program in retirement as he spent time as head of the charity for kids he had founded called Second Mile, and the charges are supposedly pretty brutal, dozens of counts against Sandusky are to be filed.

Innocent until proven guilty of course, but this raises all kinds of questions about Penn State and Second Mile, very uncomfortable ones.

Republican Block Buster

I'm hoping this means Senate majority leader Harry Reid is deep into mind games mode to try to coax the GOP into yet another "sabotage the economy" trap of their own volition, but I'm leaning more towards Republicans dropping anvils on their own feet.

Senate Democrats are teeing up yet another vote next week on a provision of President Obama’s jobs bill. This time with a twist — they’re not going to ask that it be paid for with a surtax on millionaires.

They’re calling this one the “Vow to Hire Heroes Act of 2011.” A version of it passed the House on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis last month. It would offer a tax credit to companies that hire out of work veterans and increase an existing credit that already goes to companies that hire veterans with service-related disabilities. Dems propose to cover the $1.6 billion cost of the bill by delaying fee reductions that are scheduled to apply to mortgage loans guaranteed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

They also plan to attach the bill to separate, House-passed legislation to repeal a requirement that the IRS withhold three percent of payments from major contracts, in order to encourage compliance with the tax code. 

It won't get a single Republican vote, of course.  Republicans know that if the economy improves even modestly at this point after going all in on efforts to sabotage it, they are absolutely done.  There's nothing left for them to do but continue their efforts to ruin the economy and blame Obama by obstructing every possibly beneficial piece of economic legislation, period.

The question is when both sides know exactly what the GOP's move will be, will the Democrats take advantage of it?  So far they've done a much better job of that in the last three months and it shows in the latest poll numbers for both the President and for Democrats in Congress, as the President's numbers have started to improve and Democrats are now ahead on the generic congressional ballot among registered voters.

That means 2012 will of course come down to turnout versus GOP voter suppression efforts.  Know the registration information and voter ID laws in your state, then fight them.  They are there to keep you from voting, period.

Welcome To Camp WTF

As you read this with dawning horror, I hope you keep two things in mind.  First, after this situation came to light these people were put in charge of kids that were even younger, and when that was an epic fail they got different jobs with the town.  In other words, nothing came of this.  Nothing at all.

A mother becomes suspicious when her daughter won't tell her what happened at camp that day, and admits she was ordered to keep it a secret.

The girls said they’d played a game called “What would you do for an ice cream bar?” where campers were split into groups and were rewarded with treats for completing various tasks.

First, her daughter told her she’d licked the inside of a porta-potty wall.

“The counsellor said if you do that, you can earn an ice cream bar,” she said her daughter told her.

The mother said she tried not to overreact. She told her daughter she could have gotten sick.

But then the story continued.

“And then she said, a girl laid down, she pulled up her top, I spit in her belly button and someone else drank it,” the mother said. “So they were doing body shots with spit.”

Her daughter told her other kids did worse for an ice cream snack — pole dancing without pants on and running around the outdoor camp with their shorts on their heads.

One girl sucked the toe of a male counsellor hired to work with special-needs campers, she said.

The camp's reaction was to have a "talking to" and removed the game from the curriculum.  Pole dancing in their underwear?  I wish I was joking.  I actually pulled Snopes on this just to check, and found backup with the Huffington Post.  HuffPo actually included a snippet from a camp newsletter:

"aims to provide the most incredible camp experience that the Town of Markham has to offer. We strive to keep the grounds of Chimo an extraordinary place for the birth of new friendships and memories, and also strive to create an environment where teamwork, leadership and motivation flourish."

Words fail me, but my ball bat sure would have done the trick.

Hallway Hug Gets Student Suspended

Let's apply a bit of common sense here:

Two Florida middle-school teens were suspended this week for a brief hug in the hallway.


Florida Today reports that Southwest Middle eight-grader Nick Martinez, 14, was suspended Nov. 1 when the principal of the Palm Bay, Fla., school in Brevard County witnessed him hugging his best female friend.

Brevard school officials and principal Todd Scheuerer said Martinez violated the school's longtime, no-hug policy, which is in the student handbook and online.

Martinez's mother, Nancy Crescente, tells WKMG-TV that she was "livid" about the punishment, and even the principal told WKMG that the hug was innocent.

This is why zero tolerance is an epic fail. It excuses the administration from having to look and think about the facts before making a judgment. In this case, the students who hugged were both okay with it... so why is this a bad thing? I can understand if she felt uncomfortable, but a "no hug" rule is ridiculous, and surely not helpful to the students who are under the rule.

When the principal even admits it is an innocent hug, that's enough to tell me this is bogus. We want kids to learn how to act appropriately, and when parting ways with a friend a hug can be appropriate.

Just for clarity let's look at it this way: bullying and hate speech can go under the radar, but a hug cannot. Something mighty wrong is going on.

Your Saturday Guide To Guy Day, Guys

TPM has your list of other Guy Fawkes Day "celebrations" this weekend as both Anonymous and Occupy Together have a number of things planned.

This year, a number of distinct but somewhat overlapping quasi-political protest events against banks, media companies and a Mexican drug cartel have been planned for November 5, 2011 by various groups, including various people working under the name of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, the Occupy Wall Street protesters and one woman dedicated to undermining the nation’s largest banks. Even MTV is getting in on the action.

Whether any of the plans come to fruition - and if so, to what extent - remains to be seen. After all, last November 5, 2010, passed without much action.

Still, whatever happens, there’s no denying that the day, formerly not widely celebrated outside of England, has gained currency around the Web in the last five years as the hacktivist collective Anonymous has grown, with self-identifying Anonymous members adopting and promoting the symbolism of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the vigilante main character in “V for Vendetta,” a seminal Alan Moore graphic novel turned Hollywood movie about said vigilante’s violent guerilla war against a futuristic totalitarian U.K. government. 

Still, it will be interesting to see if Operation Fox Hunt and Bank Transfer Day are successful (or if they're even noticed.)  Somehow I think both of them will be more than most people expect, but we'll see what happens on whether the Village actually reports on it or not.  Personally, I think FOX will gladly use Anonymous to tie to Obama as thugs and will do so for the rest of the campaign season.  It's right up their "Obama/ACORN/OWS/NBPP Axis of blackity black blackness coming for your nubile white daughters in the night" alley to play that particular victim card.

Keep an eye on it.  Because frankly, if FOX's online propaganda arm was shut down for a while as people realized that FOX News is not, in fact, a news organization but the media division of the GOP and its corporate masters, then maybe the country could heal a bit as Steve M. suggests.

Then again, FOX does like to overplay its hand.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• 60 Minutes mainstay Andy Rooney has passed at the age of 92 after being hospitalized for complications from minor surgery last month.
• 2010 represented the largest yearly jump in greenhouse gas emissions ever recorded by the Department of Energy.
• The jobless rate in October improved to 9.0% as the economy added 100,000 jobs a month over the last three months.
• The number of US bank closings in 2011 has reached 87 as banks in Utah and Nebraska were taken over by the FDIC.
• The Mexican Zetas drug cartel has freed a kidnapped Anonymous member in exchange for the hacker group calling off its plan to expose the cartel's membership.